Happy 50th Anniversary to Free’s third studio album Fire and Water, originally released Jun3 26, 1970.
There are certain songs in the rock pantheon that not only have stood the test of time but have become truly timeless. “Johnny B. Goode” immediately comes to mind—it’s even on the “Golden Record” that’s been flying through space on Voyager 1 since 1977.
Not quite as far-reaching, but still of a timeless quality in the rock music world are a handful of other songs that seem to transcend generations and fads. Your mileage, as they say, may vary, but we’re talking songs with anthemic qualities that are also easy to sing along with. For fifty years now, one of the biggest contenders is undoubtedly Free’s “All Right Now”—a song so ubiquitous, so memorable, so...good—that it, like Frankenstein’s Monster, outgrew not only the album from whence it came, but the band that created it.
That band was Free, a blues-based, meat-and-potatoes hard rock band formed in 1968 when its oldest members, vocalist Paul Rodgers and drummer Simon Kirke, were just eighteen years old; Paul Kossoff, the guitarist, only seventeen; and bassist Andy Fraser just fifteen.
Despite his age, the young Fraser was already a veteran of the mighty John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, prompted by another British blues patriarch, Alexis Korner, by the time he joined Free. Both Kossoff and Kirke had been playing with another heavy blues outfit, Black Cat Bones, that backed up blues pianist Champion Jack Dupree when he toured the area. Rodgers had come from Middlesborough in North Yorkshire and a band called the Roadrunners (who eventually changed their name to the Wildflowers), where he’d started out as their bassist before being prodded into singing. Soon after, Kossoff would first see Rodgers fronting the group Brown Sugar at an area nightspot and ask to sit in and jam.
Alexis Korner christened the four teens Free and they released their first album Tons of Sobs in March of 1969. Due to the minuscule recording budget (eight-hundred pounds), the album is bare-bones, live in the studio, guitar, bass, drums, vocals. It laid the groundwork for their self-titled follow-up, released in October that same year.
The songs on Free were more fully-formed and thought-out than on their debut, but even right from the start, the self-assured swagger was there: Kossoff’s powerful Les Paul attack with a vibrato you could throw a cat through (as songwriter James McMurtry would say), Fraser’s extremely confident and nimble bass, and Kirke’s no-nonsense drumming backing up one of the greatest rock vocalists to ever grace a stage or a recording booth.
When it came time for Free’s all-important third outing, the band convened at both Island studios (their label in the UK, while A&M handled their distribution stateside) and the legendary Trident in London from January to June of 1970 to make what would become their first charting, and most fully-realized, album, Fire and Water, helped out behind the boards by future Queen producer Roy Thomas Baker.
Clocking in at a relatively brief thirty-five minutes and a mere seven songs long, not a moment nor note is wasted on Fire and Water. The opening title track sets up not only the rest of Rodgers’ career as one of rock’s most powerful voices, but it also establishes a template for blues-based rock bands for generations to come. Free may not have made much of a dent in the marketplace with their previous two albums, but the ones who were listening were forming bands, buying Gibson Les Pauls if they could afford them, cutting back to the bare essentials, and turning up their Oranges or Marshalls...or both.
Rod Stewart and the Faces were huge fans of Free and would later cover “The Stealer” in their live sets. Meanwhile, an American band just about to be formed within a year down in Jacksonville, Florida would declare Free their biggest influence, so much so that Lynyrd Skynyrd made sure to write a “Free-like” song for their first three albums, while lead singer Ronnie Van Zant lifted Rodgers’ famous falsetto yelp as one of his signature tricks on many of Skynyrd’s songs. (Example of the Rodgers falsetto yelp? It’s the “leave” in the line, “Baby, I’m gonna leave ya now” that comes in the second verse of “Fire and Water.”)
Fire and Water isn’t just an album mixed up with hard rockers and ballads. In Free’s hands, the ballads rock just as hard and are just as intense as the rockers, making the entire album a powerful listening experience. The perfectly titled “Heavy Load” lumbers along like a lonely giant pacing down a desolate moonlit road at night, the piano keys plodding in tandem with Kirke’s insistent snare. On “Don’t Say You Love Me,” Rodgers conjures his strongest Atlantic soul delivery to date in the style of Wilson Pickett (who, incidentally, would hit number two on the R&B charts with his funked-up horn-and-clavinet-heavy take of “Fire and Water” shortly afterward).
Elsewhere, “Mr. Big” brings Fraser to the forefront for a bass solo for the ages. The song builds and intensifies until it almost explodes from the speakers with Fraser wrestling every ounce of soul one can from four strings while the band struggles to keep up until they collapse and resolve back into the chorus to drive the song home.
And what is there left to say about “All Right Now,” other than it was a moment of true inspiration by Andy Fraser? Free up to that point had been doing just fine with their mid-tempo and slow, lumbering heavy blues numbers, but realizing that they wanted a strong sing-along, foot-stomping closer to their sets, Fraser set about after a gig singing the chorus (“alllll riiiiight now”) and, with the help of Rodgers, had the song down in less than a half-hour.
The brilliance of “All Right Now,” like most great rock & roll, lies in its minimalism, its space. Like “Honky Tonk Women” before it, it’s the silence between the power chords Kossoff hits that ring the loudest, juxtaposed with the funkiest bass playing an English white boy ever managed in the middle section, once again building an almost unbearable tension before it releases into one of the most satisfying riff returns in rock history. It must be said that “All Right Now” also features the best use of claves in any rock song.
Free sadly would only last for another year in their original form, and they never again reached the heights of Fire and Water. They would regroup after another year (ultimately without Fraser, recruiting Tetsu Yamauchi in his stead, who ironically would also replace a departing Ronnie Lane in the Faces’ last days as well just a couple of years later), but split for good in 1973 when Kirke and Rodgers would join up with Mott the Hoople’s Mick Ralphs and King Crimson’s Boz Burrell to form Bad Company. While Bad Company definitely sold many, many more albums and tickets than Free ever did, while contributing some indisputable classics to the rock canon along the way, they never quite dug as deep or punched as hard musically.
Tragically, the rock world lost Kossoff to heroin at only twenty-five years old in 1976, while Fraser would remain in the business, writing songs and performing with the likes of the great Frankie Miller (penning “Be Good To Yourself” for him), Joe Cocker, Robert Palmer (for whom he wrote the hit, “Every Kinda People”), Chaka Khan, and even Rod Stewart, before suffering a fatal heart attack in 2015 at the age of sixty-two.
Paul Rodgers would, of course, continue with Bad Company until 1982, release a solo album the following year, be a guest vocalist on the Bill Wyman-fronted Willy and the Poorboys project where he met up with his former labelmate Jimmy Page and would devise a plan to form another successful rock group, the Firm, with Tony Franklin and Chris Slade, that would last for two acclaimed albums and a tour in the mid-’80s. In 1991, he would team up with former Faces and the Who drummer, Kenney Jones for the short-lived outfit, the Law.
After releasing a handful of exemplary solo efforts (most notably 1993’s all-star guitar-gasm tribute to Muddy Waters, appropriately named Muddy Water Blues), he would rejoin Bad Company by the end of the millennium. Still touring today, he’s been known to dip back more and more into the Free catalog. And you better believe he closes every show with “All Right Now.”
Post-script: In 1995, twenty-five years after the release of Fire and Water, a group that started as a side project during two of its members’ time off from their main gig as the new blood in a reunited Allman Brothers Band would release their self-titled debut album filled with no-nonsense, back-to-basics, meat-and-potatoes blues-based hard rock. The group was Gov’t Mule, and one of the highlights of that album was an almost note-for-note rendering, toe-curling bass solo included, of “Mr. Big,” proving that although tastes may change over time, there will always be a place for guitar, bass, drums, and a powerful voice wailing above it all.
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